Fine Abstract Scottish Landscape Art by Keith Salmon

A busy week

To say it’s been busy this week is a bit of an understatement. Of course it is the perfect excuse for why this blog is so late, ….well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

As I’ve already said in past blogs, I’m busy working on six paintings for an exhibition with Scotlandart.com at their Edinburgh gallery starting at the end of October. These paintings have to be ready and delivered in about two weeks. They’re coming on well. Two are finished and framed, two more are finished and just need putting into their frames and two are well under way and hopefully will be finished by the end of the week. I’m pleased with the four completed ones and they’ve been getting quite a lot of interest from visitors to the studio …so hopefully some of these people may go to see the exhibition once it opens.

All painting stopped on Monday evening as on Tuesday I had to travel down to London for the private view of the ‘Jolomo Landscape Painting Awards 2009 Finalists Exhibition – One Year On’. This was held at the Royal Opera Arcade Gallery in Pall-mall and luckily the organiser had managed to book us a room at the Civil Service Club not far away. It was a good journey down by train and very quick too …just five hours from Irvine to Euston and so we didn’t have to set off too early and arrived in ample time to get to the gallery by 6.30pm. It was a busy event and a very enjoyable evening. It seemed to go well with lots of interest and several paintings sold …so it’ll be interesting to hear how the remainder of the week long exhibition went. These events are always pretty tiring I find and so by half past nine we were in need of food and a beer and found somewhere just off of Trafalgar Square to recover and relax .

As we were holding our studio open weekend at the Courtyard at the weekend, there was no time for us to stay down in London to enjoy a few days of gallery visits and wandering the city. It was straight back to Scotland on Wednesday morning and a mad day and a half on Thursday and Friday morning, getting the studio ready for the weekend event. This is normally something that takes me around four days but Anita was on holiday all that week so she did a lot of work to help me. We just about got everything done by mid afternoon on Friday and then after a quick change we rushed for the train and headed over to Edinburgh for the preview of a group exhibition at the Gallery on the Corner ….in which a close friend, Lorraine Nicholson, was showing some of her photographs and paintings. It was a good show with some excellent work. The exhibition runs for two weeks so well worth a look if you’re in Edinburgh. The journey back wasn’t quite so good though. We managed to miss the half past eight train and the nine o’clock one was cancelled due to a lack of a driver. The half past nine train was then a little late leaving but at least got us back into Glasgow well in time to catch the eleven o’clock train to Irvine. We were back home by midnight …and it was at this point I decided that this blog would have to be late ….there was no way I was going to try and write it at that time of night!

We were back down the studio first thing on Saturday morning, hanging the last couple of paintings, putting labels up, sweeping the floor and going around with the spirit level checking that everything was straight. The first visitor arrived just on eleven and just as everything was completed.

It was a good weekend. The weather was fine and this brought out lots of people. I’m not sure of the exact numbers but I’d estimate around about two hundred over the course of the weekend …so pretty good. I have a couple of potential sales along with much interest …so I’m more than happy. I think most of the other twelve artists made sales or potential sales and I know one artist got a commission …so at the end yesterday evening we were all happy, if just a little tired.